Some people may also get discouraged by long hospital wait times. With the average wait to see a doctor at 18.5 days, not all people have the luxury of waiting for so long.

This goes double for patients with life-threatening diseases. The patients with chronic conditions, who stand to benefit the most from the appointments, are the ones most likely to miss them.

Other reasons for not showing up include poor medical literacy — meaning that patients have limited understanding of what’s important for their health — as well as language barriers, anxiety, and logistical problems.

More on the latter: in the US alone, 3.6 million people miss or delay appointments due to transportation issues. Be it a broken-down car or faulty public transportation, people may miss appointments despite their best intentions.

Lastly, let’s not forget about forgetting. Human memory can be quite selective when it comes to what we should and shouldn’t remember.

A missed appointment is more than just a missed opportunity. When a patient doesn’t show up on time, it also affects people who could’ve been treated instead of that patient.

As Kim Decker, chief of the Martin Army Community Hospital Healthcare Management Division, puts it: “An appointment missed by you is an appointment missed by two.”

In the end, the biggest victim of a missed appointment is patient satisfaction.

What’s there to do? How to make sure that everyone is satisfied and gets treated on time?

Before we start searching for the answers, let’s look at the other side of this coin — the doctors.

Doctors and Queue Management: How No-Shows Affects Hospital Staff

What happens when patients decide to skip their appointments?

Plain and simple, the doctors lose their valuable time.

It may not sound as terrible of a consequence, but in the world where time is money, missed appointments are more than inconvenience. David Kaplan, vice chairman of administration at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, calculates that surgeons lose up to 500 dollars per missed visit.

This isn’t exclusive to surgery, either. Costs incurred due to missed appointments happen across different departments and wards.

True, different practices have different no-show rates. It can go as low as 10% for dental practice, and as high as 37% for mental health facilities.

Whatever the number, the outcome is the same: no-shows are losing you money.

But now that we’ve outlined the problem, what’s the solution?

One way doctors can make people remember about their appointments is by setting up reminder calls. An SMS notification can go a long way and is not hard to set up, but there are more effective alternatives.

Studies show that live calls are more efficient than recorded messages in helping patients remember to follow up on their appointments. The percentage of patients who are likely to forget about their appointments is 17.3% for recorded messages and 13.6% for live calls.

It seems that we’ve stumbled upon a solution, except there is another problem — live calls eat up a lot of work time. They are often made during busy hours, which makes staffers lose their focus and, more importantly, time.

Live calls aren’t a surefire remedy, either. A patient can still decide not to show up, despite the reminders. In this case, the staff needs to waste even more time to call the patient up and schedule the next appointment.

Long story short, even at their most effective, reminder calls are not the best route to take.

They are definitely a step in the right direction, though. A live call helps establish a personal connection with a patient. But why is that so important, exactly?

We’ve already looked over some of the reasons why patients are not showing up for their appointments. One of the biggest reasons by far has nothing to do with medical illiteracy or insufficient funds — it’s about lack of a personal connection with the doctor.

One way to keep this personal connection while managing the heavy patient traffic is to opt for walk-ins instead of appointments.

This may sound like a backwards solution at first. After all, we tend to associate walk-ins with something random, unexpected — chaotic, even.

And unless you’re being smart about it, they’re going to be exactly that.

These average metrics may not be the best stats to reflect your facility’s performance, but they offer a discomforting insight into the healthcare industry.

Quite often, hospital administration doesn’t even know what their no-show rate is. That is to say, they can’t calculate their losses.

Footfall analytics isn’t a thing exclusive to businesses. If hospital are to survive, they need to adopt some of the best practices of retail — the power of analytics.

What to do with no-shows and how to cut the losses?

A number of hospitals tried to adopt the practice of fining patients who don’t show up, to recoup some of the losses. This can deliver some immediate returns, but on a larger scale, it’s more like a bandage rather than a cure.

And as we’ve discussed before, there may be circumstances beyond anyone’s control. Being fined due to your own negligence is one thing, but because of heavy traffic or a broken-down car?

This drives further the frustration people already feel with healthcare.

When things going as they are, a no-show rate can quickly change into a never-again rate. Hospital administration is going to lose patients, with no way of regaining them or their trust.

Hospital administrations need to embrace the benefits of queue management systems to keep up with the times. From analytics and staff planning to, ultimately, improved word-of-mouth marketing — a QMS is an all-in-one solution for healthcare.

Improving the Walk-In Experience with Qminder

Patient no-shows are a significant problem in healthcare. They affect not only non-attending patients but also other visitors, doctors, and even hospital administration.